The Bodily Dimension in Thinking

PART TWO. The Return of the Body in Exile: Nietzsche

PART TWO  At the Limits of Phenomenology Two Phenomenological Accounts of the Body Despite the fact that it remains related to Cartesianism, the phenomenological movement, as founded by Husserl and developed afterward by German and French philosophers, makes a decisive step in reopening thinking to the world in its phenomenal richness and with this to bodies and ways of thinking bodily.This movement leaves behind the neo-Kantian epistemological trap framed by the distinction between the thing as it appears and the thing in itself. Phenomenology turns to the world of appearances, describing appearances both in the direction of the manifold ways in which they appear objectively (as things immediately present, or imagined, or remembered, etc.) and in the direction of how they are given or constituted in acts of consciousness or perception (acts of thinking, willing , feeling). By conceiving what is thought or perceived always in correlative unity with the act of thinking or perceiving (the intentio-intentum correlation) phenomenology, in principle, overcomes the split between the world of consciousness and the world of things “outside” consciousness that Descartes articulates as the division between a thinking substance (res cogitans) and an extended substance (res extensa). Bodies become phenomena of philosophical inquiry not only as body-objects (Körper), but also as lived bodies (Leib) in correlation to acts of thought and perception that include bodily (kinaesthetic) movements. One could argue that by overcoming the split between appearance and thing in itself, Nietzsche’s problematic of the overcoming of a two-world order becomes obsolete. Who cares whether behind the appearing object lies a true 39 object or not! Is phenomenology not perfectly happy with the surface, with how things appear for a subject? However, from a Nietzschean perspective, one can easily reply that in phenomenology still persists the shadow of the old god of metaphysics. Does phenomenology, especially Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (after the transcendental turn in Ideas I ), not still believe in a subject-unity? Does phenomenology not perpetuate the belief in truth when it speaks of the immediate presence of an object in its self-givenness? One could argue that Husserlian phenomenology is an extreme form of Cartesianism, a witness to the triumph of subjectivity that we find celebrated when Hegel’s spirit realizes itself after having sublimated (aufgehoben) all negativity. Now, there is no more “outside” to consciousness, our whole concern now is how things appear within consciousness . Whereas in Descartes and Kant there at least was a sense of something escaping consciousness (god, things in themselves, i.e., bodies), now all that counts is what presents itself to consciousness and—in the case of Husserl’s transcendental philosophy—this is even conceived as being constituted in consciousness. One should note however, that the later Husserl develops the notion of an “operative intentionality,” that is, of an opening of consciousness to the outside that allows for consciousness to constitute phenomena objectively. Even Husserl’s phenomenology does not exhaust itself in the clarity of a theoretical self-consciousness. In its later stage it starts merging into the opaqueness of the life-world from which all philosophical reflection emerges. When phenomenology turns to the question of its own genesis in the life-world, it rediscovers the lived body and with it an otherness at its very heart. Subjectivity dissolves from within and thinking finds itself emerging in a living engagement with the world. Thus, phenomenology, like Nietzsche’s philosophy, is a threshold at which reemerges the bodily dimension in thinking, and, with it, an opening to, or rather within the world. Although it remains tied to a subject-object structure that limits the accounts of the bodily dimension in thinking, phenomenology is a threshold that allows different ways of thinking to emerge (for instance Heidegger’s thought or contemporary French thought). The following chapters discuss the most thought-provoking texts with respect to the issues of the bodily dimension in thinking. It considers two quite different phenomenological thinkers, Max Scheler and Maurice MerleauPonty . Max Scheler originally was not a Husserl scholar (he studied with neoKantian Rickert) but became part of the phenomenology circle of Munich. He therefore combines more traditional neo-Kantian elements with phenomenological analyses. In many ways his thought of a “Wesensschau” recalls Plato’s eidetic seeing. However, in distinction to Plato, Scheler makes also very acute 40 The Bodily Dimension in Thinking and careful analyses of the body that take him to the...